Known Trivia

Henry Woolf reprised the role of villainous Frankie Barrow in the parent BBC TV series episode “The Seven Steptoerai” in 1974.

The graffiti in and around the tower block lift include “Lovely Big Tits Heather”, “Knocker Swill Phil” and “Slippery Phil L.S.D.” Tellingly the set dresser was Philip Cowlam whilst the make-up artist was Heather Nurse.

The Steptoes live at 26A Oil Drum Lane.

Albert Ladysmith Steptoe was born on February 10th 1901.

Goofs: Continuity: When Harold tells his dad that Hercules The Second ran away at Acton Park, Albert's pigeon-chewing varies from shot-to-shot.

Plot: Albert Steptoe and his son Harold are junk dealers, complete with horse and cart to tour the neighbourhood… See more » | »

Story: Albert Steptoe and his son Harold are junk dealers, complete with horse and cart to tour the neighbourhood. They also live amicably together at the junk yard. Always on the lookout for ways to improve his lot, Harold invests his father’s life savings in a greyhound who is almost blind and can’t see the hare. When the dog loses a race and Harold has to pay off the debt, he comes up with another bright idea. Collect his father’s life insurance. To do this his father must pretend to be dead. Written byDerek Picken <dpicken@email.msn.com>

10 Comments

Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973) is the best of the two filmsfeaturing the duo of Albert and Harold. Harold is on his rounds one dayand runs into a harried housewife and somehow winds up in York. By thetime he comes back home, the business work horse is stressed out fromthe long trip back to Shepard’s Bush. Without a horse to pull thecarriage, Albert dips into his family savings to buy a "new" one. ButHarold feels he’s a better business man than his father so he takes itupon himself to buy the animal. Hours later, Harold comes home withsomething Albert’s not quite looking for. Will everything work out?Remember these are the Steptoes!

Unlike the last film which was like the series, a melodramatic comedythis film is more of a farce. It’s highly entertaining and and prettyfar out the lengths the Steptoes will go to get themselves out of hock.If you like British comedies or farcical humor then this movies justfor you.

I enjoyed this film a bit more than the first film. They’re both funnyand pretty amusing. I have to strongly recommend this movie.

This movie could very well be my funniest and favourite film! If, likeme you are a Steptoe fan, you will find this movie perfect. Albert andHarold are on excellent form as the cat and mouse father and soncharacters. They also utilise the whole of their characters from theseries in this film.

The antics that made them famous from the long-running series is justwhat the viewer gets here whether its Harold having to go to work witha sandwich made from fag hash and mangle-flattened cheese! or Albertsneezing on a prime cut of steak just to get it cheaper ("It's not forme, it's for the dog"!)

The previous Steptoe outing was very commendable but I feel it didn'tgive us enough to satisfy us for 90 minutes. However, '…Ride Again'has to be the best movie conversion from a t.v comedy yet.

Trust me, you will enjoy this movie if you enjoy the series and thecharacters then this is perfect.

This is a colossal improvement over the first movie. It restores whatSTEPTOE AND SON is about – comedy in a depressing set of situations(poverty, down-on-luck, hopelessness, etc). This movie is much morefaithful to the TV series and just demonstrates why the first movieshould never have been made. The first movie was perhaps the worstspin-off movie ever, even worse than GEORGE AND MILDRED, and certainlyone of the most painful movies I've ever sat through.

The STEPTOE AND SON series was not only the pride and joy of itscreators Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, but also the BBC (for whom thiswas perhaps the best comedy at the time, rivalled only by DAD'S ARMY).The TV series has and always will have my 10 out of 10 rating withoutany reservation. A wise decision by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson towrite the script ensures we have a movie that matches up to the TVseries to at least some extent.

The plot is something along the following lines – the horse becomes illand has to be taken away, and Harold is conned by local gangsterFrankie Barrow (one of the best comic villains of all time) into buyinga greyhound! Harold sees a money-making opportunity to be had, but theSteptoes have their work cut out! Later Harold has to pay off his debtsto Frankie Barrow and finds the only way to do this is by fakingAlbert's death!

The mix of comedy and drama is handled well here, the touching scenewhere Albert and Harold say goodbye to the horse is a very good exampleof this. In the first movie, the comedy and drama did not mix well andthe audience was left with something dreary and depressing, as well asbeing unfunny to the extreme. In this movie, they are left withsomething uplifting that sets the standard for the rest of the movie.

The mixture of jokes and slapstick normally seen in British sitcommovie adaptations of this kind is also handled well here. My favouriteis during a scene where the locals are invited to a sale at theSteptoes' yard. Albert falls over and shouts to someone, "that's mytea, you silly old cow" or something like that. Side-splittinghilarity. Equally funny is a scene where Albert goes into a butchersand cons the butcher into selling him a joint of meat cheap. How doeshe do it? He coughs all over it. The expression on the butcher's facewhen Albert tries to hand the infected meat back is priceless.

The usual excellent performances by Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H.Corbett are delivered here. The movie also boasts a hilarious cameofrom Milo O'Shea, in what is perhaps this actor's best comic moment.Henry Woolf also has a good time playing the local villain FrankieBarrow, a role he later reprised in the TV series. On the downside,Diana Dors is wasted in a pointless role as a widow whose husband'sclothes she wishes to sell.

Overall, this is a genuinely funny movie (unlike the first). Thelight-hearted nature of the TV series that was stripped away by theprevious movie is restored. This movie is not as good as the TV series,but it is a harmless way to pass 90 minutes of a weekend afternoon andit looks like Oscar-worthy material compared to the first movie.

I watched it again last night as it was broadcast on BBC2. I hadn'tseen it for quite a while although the earlier film was on a few monthsago. They never fail to make me laugh. Whether some of the comedy islost in time and translation – both the series and the films possess agood deal of London humour, west London in particular – I don't knowbut there are a good many gems to be found in the film.

Diana Dors' character makes only a brief appearance near the start ofthe film. It's when she pulls Harold onto her bed after offering himboth her dead husband's clothes (and then herself!), that it's revealedthat her old man is only freshly deceased beside them! The return tripfrom York put paid to poor old Hercules the horse. Two hundred milesand three days on the road would tire any horse so a replacement isneeded. Unfortunately Harold gets conned at Southall (horse) market andFrankie Barrett – brilliantly played with menace by Henry Woolfe -fleeces him for his cash and sells him a blind greyhound instead!Barrett fleeces him again later in the film but I won't spoil it. Let'sjust say his embezzlement became more ambitious!

Look out for the location shots of White City stadium. It was one ofthe biggest stadiums in the UK, was built for the London Olympics of1908 and hosted all manner of sports including speedway, greyhounds andrugby league (in the 1930s, being the home of the short-lived LondonHighfield) before being torn down in the mid-1980s. The site is nowoccupied by the massive extension to BBC Television Centre. The localtube station is still called White City.

True fans of Steptoe and Son will love this movie. I have both theTelevision series and the movies on DVD. I cannot agree with thenegative remarks made by the previous reviewer. (btw, The dog wasblind, not deaf, thus the glasses and contact lenses) I have watchedthis movie dozens of times now and still love it. Dr. Popplewell (MiloO’Shea) examining the ‘dead’ body is one of the highlights of the film.Much of the humor can be missed if one watches the movie casually. (Theinebriated doctor grabbing one of the liquor bottles from the dresseron his way out following the medical examination for example) I nevertire of watching this movie or the TV series.

Tom May (joycean_chap@hotmail.com) from United Kingdom29 Jun 2013, 2:00 pm

"Steptoe and Son" is one of my favourite of many redoubtable Britishsitcoms; we used to be, and still are, in the shape of "Phoenix Nights","The Office" and "I’m Alan Partridge", rather good at this sort of thing.Yet British film comedy; or more specifically attempts to transfer a TVsuccess to film, have largely failed. Often horrendously badly! British filmcomedy can only really look back to Will Hay (of whom I’ve never seen anyfilms actually), the Ealing comedies, some late-1950s Sellers pieces, MontyPython, the odd stray triumph, and the fact that it has produced comedicactors great in American films: Stan Laurel, Chaplin, Sellers andothers.

"Steptoe and Son Ride Again" attempts to be closer to the original TV showthan the previous "Steptoe and Son" film of 1972, which was quite horriblytrite at times. Galton and Simpson script, so there should be no problemthere, but there is: pointless bits are included and coincidences arefoisted upon the film to make the plot come together. Corbett and Brambellare perfectly in character, but what are they given? A lame duck opening tothe film; that takes in a yawn-worthy plot device of a greyhound and abizarre cameo from a portly, pallidly wasted Diana Dors. Who sanctionedthis? We also don’t really get to see the actors doing the expertly windinglong scenes of Galton and Simpson dialogue, so familiar to fans of the TVseries. Perhaps the makers thought they had to, with a film of ‘Steptoe’, upthe ante visually in some way by having more ‘action’. Somewhat missing thepoint about the series.

Once things get to the actual plot – about the insurance policy on Albert’slife and the ‘funeral’ – the comedy finally breaks out upon the picture,like a supply of embezzled honey to an ailing bee. The lacklustre nature ofearly sequences is always in mind, however, as is the lack of real cinematicinterest, despite the attempts at activity. Milo O’Shea is always a pleasureto see, and the scene with his drunken Doctor is a deftly played delight.The wake is pretty well done, and with Harold leaping through a graveyard,some interesting shots are captured at last, by the director.

This central plot is frankly not central enough, and the coda ending isreally deflating in its unrelated flippancy. With such a blackly humorous,potentially poignant farce of a scenario, an ending of impact and subtlesadness – there has rarely been a sitcom as achingly melancholic as"Steptoe" at its best – would have possibly raised the film to somethingspecial – yet we return to the irrelevancies of the early part of the film.What a shame; with this film the makers managed to actually hit upon a goodidea, but they squander its attending possibilities… How emblematic isthis of the ennui and failure of British film in the 1970s…? Well, atleast it has its very good central proposition; which makes up quite asizeable sequence of very good material, I suppose.

Like a lot of '70's sitcoms, 'Steptoe & Son' was turned into a movie.So successful was the movie in question it was granted the rare honourof a sequel. I used to think the first was the better of the two, butafter recently viewing both I have changed my mind. The second is thefunniest by far. Unlike the first, the plot is episodic, slightlymacabre at times, particularly the opening where Diana Dors' housewifewants to make love to Harold with her dead husband in the same room tothe last section where Harold fakes Albert's death in order to pull offan insurance scam.

Brambell and Corbett are as excellent as ever, and the supporting castincludes old reliables such as Frank Thornton, Geoffrey Bayldon, SamKydd, Neil McCarthy, Yootha Joyce and Milo O'Shea ( as drunken'Dr.Popplewell' ).

Unfortunately, the Steptoe family are a different bunch to the one wegot in the classic episode 'Oh What A Beautiful Mourning'. It wouldhave been nice to have seen 'Potty Ada' ( Rita Webb ) andbible-thumping Nobby ( Tommy Godfrey ) again, and not just for reasonsof continuity.

Henry Woolf's self-styled 'Godfather of Shepherd's Bush' Frankie Barrowappeared the following year in the episode 'The Seven Steptoerai'.

Plenty of visual comedy ( more so than the first film ) including thesight of the Steptoes trying to train their greyhound Hercules, Albertkilling and eating his neighbour's chickens, Harold almost frighteninghis father to death with the head of a shop window dummy, Albert risingout of his coffin and screaming, and Harold being knocked out when avan door hits him in the face.

Funniest moment – Harold, emerging from a crypt, wearing a hospitalgown and his head wrapped in bandages. He looks like one of the livingdead, and almost causes the Vicar ( Geoffrey Bayldon ) to drop dead offright! Directed by Peter Sykes, who made a number of the 'Tara King'episodes of 'The Avengers' and the Frankie Howerd classic 'The House InNightmare Park'.

The second of the big-screen Steptoe spin-offs is patchy and episodic, butit’s still far better than the dreadfully lame first instalment, with abunch of great British character actors and familiar comedy playersthreatening to steal the show at every turn and a handful of set-piecesthat, whilst certainly overstretched, never fail to raise at least a coupleof honest laughs. The funniest segment of the film is definitely the lastthird, in which Harold fakes Albert’s death (the scene with Milo O’Shea ispriceless from start to finish) in order to "cop the insurance", but thingsdon’t go entirely to plan – particularly with the arrival of some of the oldman’s shady friends and relations who want to give Albert "a real totter’sfuneral" (any excuse for a booze-up, notes the elder Steptoe cynically) anda supercilious insurance company representative (Frank Thornton, brilliantas always) who informs Harold that he may not be the sole beneficiary!

Fans of the series will notice numerous similarities between RIDE AGAIN andthe classic TV episode ‘Oh What A Beautiful Mourning’, both of which pokedwell-observed fun at the tawdriness and barely-concealed internicine greedand bickering unique to funerals in extended families. This is no classic,but it’s no disaster either, and any permanent record of these wonderfulcharacters must be cherished.

Okay, so the second Steptoe movie isn't up to the best of thetelevision series, and doesn't reach the same bitter-sweet place thatthe first movie finally does, yet there's some decent laughs to be hadalong the way to a riotous last twenty minutes.

The Steptoe's horse has to be retired, so the pair cash in the oldman's life savings and go off to buy a new horse. Things getcomplicated when Harold, the son, wastes the money on a blind greyhoundwho loses every race. This little "investment" puts them in hock to alocal gangster, and they must find £160 or some serious violence willbe inflicted upon them (it's amazing the amount of 70s Brit comedy thatrevolves around being threatened by heavies – what does that say aboutthe then society and economy?). Hope arises from the fact that Steptoesenior has an insurance policy on his life, so the two of them fake hisdeath.

Laughs are to be had from the pair's attempts to make the blindgreyhound run, and from the blind drunk doctor's signing of Dad's deathcertificate. Things get better when all the local rag and bone men, andtheir vulgar wives, turn up for the wake and proceed to have a drunkenrave up. More complications, and the living old man is taken to thegrave in a coffin, surrounded by a quite magnificent rag-man's funeralprocession, which is a bit of a wake for a dying way of life (as one ofthe characters admits). But the best is yet to come: at the graveyard,the Priest utters meaningless words about the resurrection of the bodybut, when he sees the body being resurrected, he runs afrighted aboutthe graveyard as if he was encountering a cockney version of the Nightof the Living Dead! The film manages to show up the hypocrisy of afaith that has come to be no more than words intoned without beliefbehind them; genuinely Ortonesque comedy, far better than the Loot filmadaptation which Galton and Simpson screwed up completely.

The film ends with father and son restored to life, and linked in theownership of a racehorse with another fading British institution: theroyal family. In such ways does the film subtly suggest that an oldvision of Britain will soon to run its last race. It is an afterlifethat both the Steptoes and the Windsors are living now…

As usual both Albert & Harold are deep in debt, and this is made worse whenHarold gets ripped off buying a short-sighted greyhound from the localgangster instead of buying a decent horse for their rag & bonebusiness.

Harold comes home from the business deal drunk to the eyeballs and Albertisn’t at all impressed, especially with the dog and his rather largeappetite for steaks & eggs.

Harold tries to placate Albert by telling him the greyhound is a born winneron the track and that with a bit of training the dog should be able to winenough races to make them a nice little profit.

Unfortunately the plan doesn’t quite work out and the same local gangster isthreatening violence if they don’t repay him the outstanding loan for thedog.

With nothing else worth selling Harold decides the only thing left of anyvalue is is father’s insurance policy. The only fly in the ointment is thatAlbert has to die in order for the insurance company to pay up and thus freeHarold of his dangerous debt.

For those who grew up on the BBC TV series of Steptoe & Son, you willprobably be quite disappointed at this rather flimsy little story that isfar too long for the movies and the comedy always feel forced &contrived.

The humour is often very black or vulgar, which in truth is no differentfrom the TV show. But the real difference between the two is the movieversion lacks the comedic polish & spontinaity of a live audience. Bothactors seem to revel & interact far better in front of TV cameras and abunch of people than on location with a film crew and a succession of takes& breaks.

The film has its moments, especially involving the training of the adorablelittle greyhound, but the bulk of the film is relatively forgettable. Theacting is ok but the direction is very jagged & irritating to the point ofbeing almost unwatchable at times.

For all the criticisms however, its still quite good for a Sundayafternoon’s worth of entertainment when there’s little else to do. But forpurists I would opt for episodes of the TV series everytime.